When The CW first launched Arrow, there was no way anybody expected it to spawn an entire extended universe of similar superhero shows. After Arrow came four more shows, and out of all five, the most popular one is actually The Flash, the show that follows Barry Allen as he becomes the fastest man alive. Barry goes on to fight crime with a group of close friends from S.T.A.R. Labs, using a combination of iffy science and earnest heart.
Just because a show is popular doesn't mean that everything about it holds up under close scrutiny. The Flash, a show famous for its use of time travel, is known for having gaps in its narrative logic and a ton of plot holes. This list compiles the widest holes in the story of The Flash. It shouldn't surprise anyone that a show with such convoluted storylines has a few that make no sense--and to enjoy the show, we've all just had to ignore this stuff.
No TV show is perfect. Every story is likely to have some element that you ignore because it doesn't make sense, or doesn't work with the rest of it, and TV shows have to fill up way more airtime than movies and are therefore way more likely to have more mistakes. This list shouldn't make you like The Flash any less, because it doesn't change what's great about it. That also doesn't mean we shouldn't take a closer look and examine all the ways the show messed up.
Here are 20 Things Wrong With The Flash We All Choose To Ignore.
20 Barry Allen shouldn't be alive
Viewers of the The Flash unfamiliar with the source material might not know this, but Barry Allen actually has a surprisingly tragic history. Barry was the one who introduced the concept of the Multiverse to DC continuity, but he also perished in the Speed Force while saving it. This was retconned over 20 years later, of course, but the ostensible passing stuck with readers for a long time.
While The Flash paid homage to this when Barry defeated Zoom using a time remnant, there hasn't been a truly devastating tragedy in the show yet. Given Barry's history in the comics, anyone familiar with it is likely just trying to ignore a voice in the back of their heads saying this could all get real dark real soon.
19 The unregulated private prison in S.T.A.R. Labs
Superhero movies and TV shows have always had a fraught relationship with police and the criminal justice system, they don't usually involve the heroes creating their own prisons and populating them with supervillains. That's exactly what Team Flash did, as they converted part of S.T.A.R. Labs into a series of cells specialized for containing metahumans.
This is more than a little troubling.
While government-run prisons hardly have a stellar reputation in America, an unregulated super-prison run by a a handful of scientists sounds worse. We love Cisco, Caitlin, Barry, and all of Team Arrow, but we don't think we'd want to be in a prison run by them, without any oversight.
18 Does time travel affect nothing or everything?
A refrain you'll hear from The Flash is that traveling through time can have ripple effects through all of history, and that's why speedsters shouldn't change the timeline willy-nilly. This logic mostly held together for the first two seasons of the show, but it all fell apart after that.
Time traveling became a much bigger part of the overall storylines in later seasons. While some of it did have the ripple effects on other parts of the timeline, a lot of it didn't have much at all. Therefore, we have to ask: does changing the past really have such catastrophic effects on the future, or is that just a convenient mechanism to move the plot forward that the writers can ignore when it suits them?
17 Barry shouldn't have saved his mom
This might be tough to reconcile, but it's true by any objective measure. Barry Allen spends much of the second season coming to terms with his mother's passing, yet in the finale he goes back in time to stop the Reverse Flash from terminating her anyway. There are more than a few reasons why this wasn't just a selfish choice, it was an actively bad one.
Basically every character had told Barry not to mess with the timeline like that.
Time wraiths are a thing. He'd also spent the whole season getting over it, just to go back and try to erase his childhood trauma from existence. Finally, the new altered timeline is actually worse for Barry's loved ones! It's almost like this was all a mistake that could have been easily prevented!
16 Savitar makes no sense
The Flash has structured much of its narrative around time travel, and a lot of that has resulted in circular temporal paradoxes. These occur when an object or event is explained by that same thing. Sometimes it sort of works, like when Barry himself became the lightning that gave Barry his own powers.
Other times, it doesn't-- as is the case with Savitar. The entire concept of time remnants is pretty sketchy, and Savitar is actually a time remnant of Barry Allen from an erased future where Iris perished. If you can get past that logic, you also have to swallow the part where this time remnant, shunned by Team Flash, gets so angry that he decided to become a cult leader and evil god of speed. Which, you know, sounds just like something Barry would do.
15 Barry should be better at fighting
If you apply even a little bit of logic to a person who has the power of super speed, you'll see that they should be a nigh-unstoppable force. This means that Barry Allen should be considerably better than he is at taking down bad guys. With some exceptions, like some speedsters and others with powers or strategies that counteract Barry's speed, the Flash should basically end every fight in less than a second.
Random baddies are still able to land unpowered punches on our scarlet speedster.
Barry should be impossible to hit with just about anything, but that wouldn't be interesting to television audiences, so Barry is constantly portrayed as being unable to stop C-list villains from giving him a hard time.
14 Time travel should fix everything
One of the trickiest things for TV writers to manage is to create realistic, tense stakes for their characters, so that it feels like their choices and actions have real consequences. Obviously, adding something as powerful as time travel to The Flash makes that goal nearly impossible, as you can basically say that whatever bad things might happen, Barry could potentially fix them by literally undoing them.
The fact of the matter is that it's difficult to create a satisfying narrative that makes sense while still having time travel, but it's a problem you just kind of have to ignore to enjoy The Flash. Yes, Barry could theoretically fix any given negative outcome, but that wouldn't be a very fun story.
13 Watching two speedsters fight is boring
Obviously, The Flash, the show about the fastest man alive, involves a lot of scenes where two super-fast individuals duke it out. The primary antagonists of most of the show's four seasons have been other speedsters, like the Reverse Flash. While it's understandable that this would be the writers' go-to villain, the fact is that fights between speedsters are just not interesting to watch.
Unlike Arrow, which involves a ton of martial arts action, The Flash has been forced to use a lot of CGI-enhanced speedster fights.
These fights tend to manifest as two blurs of color zipping around Central City. While the CGI is pretty impressive for a TV show, there's just no way to make that into an engaging action scene.
12 Wally West is a way bigger deal in the comics
If you went by nothing but The Flash, you might think that Wally West was always a kind of sidekick to Barry Allen, just the Kid Flash. While that may be how he comes off in the CW show, fans of the comics know that Wally West has a legitimate claim to being the most important Flash in DC Comics.
After Barry Allen perished, Wally West took over the mantle of the Flash for the next two decades in the comics. For a lot of people, Wally West is the Flash they remember growing up with. All in all, Wally is just as big a deal as Barry for most people, but fans of the show may only know Wally as Kid Flash.
11 Captain Cold left the show
If you ask comic nerds about the Flash's archnemesis, you might be surprised to hear that it isn't the Reverse Flash or the Black Flash-- it's actually Captain Cold, as Leonard Snart is usually seen as the greatest of the Flash's enemies. The writers of the Arrowverse, however, didn't seem to agree with that conclusion.
Snart left The Flash to join Legends of Tomorrow, another Arrowverse show that spun him into an antihero role.
While Wentworth Miller's performance lent itself to this more versatile, redemptive approach to the character, comics fans had to be disappointed to see Snart disappear from The Flash as though he was just a secondary concern.
10 Caitlin Snow’s evil powers
The Flash deals with a multitude of characters that have to contend with a sudden onset of superpowers, the "metahumans." However, the vast majority of these metahumans don't have their personality radically changed by the powers themselves. There's only one exception, and that's Caitlin Snow, aka Killer Frost.
Killer Frost is Caitlin's evil side, the one that uses ice powers to terrorize the citizens of Central City.
These ice powers somehow turn Caitlin evil, despite that happening to none of the other metahumans.
It's all a pretty transparent attempt by the writers to spice things up and generate conflict by having Caitlin be a bad guy for some episodes, and it doesn't make a lot of sense.
9 Barry isn’t actually the fastest man alive
We know Barry says that he's "the fastest man alive" in literally every episode of The Flash, but when you look at the facts, you have to conclude that he just isn't. Every season of The Flash thus far has showcased a villain that is much, much faster than Barry, from the Reverse Flash to Zoom to Savitar.
Frequently, Barry's emotional arc rests on him coming to grips with the fact that he can't solve the problem by outrunning these villainous speedsters. Other, more creative solutions have to be found to stop these big bads, as it wouldn't be satisfying to see Flash simply be faster than them. However, this also means that logically, the Flash is almost never actually the fastest man alive at any given time.
8 How does S.T.A.R. Labs stay open?
The Flash actually does have an in-universe explanation for how S.T.A.R. Labs stays open despite not producing or researching anything new for years. Supposedly, Harrison Wells' past patents and contracts were so lucrative that the lab can function on just the income. That's a really thin explanation, as Wells' past inventions would have to be astronomically profitable for the math to even come close to making sense. There's also the question of the lab's reputation.
S.T.A.R. Labs is canonically hated by the public of Central City, as everyone knows it was responsible for the particle accelerator explosion.
Even if you put money aside, it's highly unlikely that Central City's government or citizens would allow the lab to continue to work.
7 Have you tried running faster?
Looking at the full scope of the Flash's powers, you might think they're very complex. After all, aside from moving at the speed of light, Barry Allen can travel through time, create lightning and tornadoes, phase through solid matter and access the mysterious Speed Force. But the problem is that Barry's powers are actually extremely simple: the boy moves fast.
This means that in a substantial number of The Flash episodes, the main conflict of the story comes down to Barry Allen running slightly faster than he was before. We know you run fast, Barry, but if you run really fast you'll create a vortex! And if you run really, really fast you can travel through time! You see how this might get old after several seasons?
6 The passing of Eddie Thawne
Just about every website covering The Flash has pointed out the holes here, but in case you hadn't heard: Eddie Thawne didn't need to off himself to stop the Reverse Flash. It may seem that way, given that Eddie is Eobard Thawne's ancestor, but not only was there an alternative method to accomplish the same goal, the act didn't actually stop the villain anyway.
Eddie could have just thought ahead and gotten a vasectomy to ensure he would never have descendants.
Even that wouldn't have made much of a difference, because Eobard Thawne continues to exist as a time remnant, despite the temporal paradox. So why even bump Eddie off in the first place?
5 Iris should have been the first to find out about Barry’s power
If there's one thing fans of The Flash know about Barry Allen, it is that he is head-over-heels in love with Iris West. Barry and Iris have become a cute couple, but their early will-they-won't-they relationship was intensified by the fact that Barry kept his super speed a secret from her.
Barry quite literally told most of the people close to him about his powers before he told Iris. While this made sense from a dramatic standpoint, it made no sense for the character. We find it hard to believe that Barry would actually keep this a secret from Iris, given that she's the person he cares about most in the world. By that metric, Barry should have told her before anyone else, not after everyone else.
4 The West family dynamic is really weird
Barry Allen's interactions with the West family are heartwarming on the surface level, as they all genuinely care about one another and are doing their best to support each other. But if you think about it for even a second, the West family is more than a little awkward.
There's the fact that Barry is basically Joe West's foster son and Iris' step-brother, making his relationship with her pretty uncomfortable.
The show may act like Iris and Barry have a perfectly healthy relationship, but it's hard not to get a little weirded out by it. Plus, there's also Wally West, Joe's estranged son who didn't meet him until he was an adult. Add to the fact that Joe now also has a newborn daughter with Cecille Horton, and you start to realize that Joe's family life is kind of odd.
3 Cisco is bad at naming superheroes, including himself
Cisco Ramon, when he isn't being a scientific genius, is Team Flash's resident goofball, bringing dorky humor to just about every interaction. This extends to his interactions with metahumans, as he tends to get the honor of coming up with their official name. Granted, these names are usually drawn straight from the comics themselves, so we can't really fault the character for thinking "Captain Cold" was a good nickname.
We can fault him for the nickname he came up for himself when he learned he had superpowers of his own. Cisco decided to call himself "Vibe," and then The Flash had the gall to act like that was a great, clever superhero name. His superhero name alone should be enough to convince fans that the naming reins should have been handed to someone else.
2 Its time travel rules contradict Legends of Tomorrow
The Flash is just one of two shows in the Arrowverse that involve a lot of time travel, the other being Legends of Tomorrow. While you might think the two series' writers would talk to one another about their collective rules for time travel, you would be very wrong. While The Flash at least tries to be responsible with changing the timeline, Legends takes a different approach.
Legends of Tomorrow doesn't let silly things like rules get in the way of a crazy, explosive story.
Its episodes take place all throughout history, and the Legends don't really care if some huge timeline-changing event happens. Legends ostensibly has the Time Masters to protect the timeline, but its whole attitude toward time travel couldn't be more different from The Flash.
1 Barry should be the best-read person on the planet
This one is relatively simple. Barry Allen has the gift of super-speed, and that canonically extends to his reading abilities. Barry can retain and comprehend any book in seconds, and while that sounds exhausting, it means he could read more books in a day than most people read in their entire lives.
By this logic, you can forget Barry being the fastest man alive. He should be the best-read person on the planet, an expert in dozens of academic fields. He should be the most knowledgeable character in the show, but he just isn't. Instead, Barry doesn't really use his super-reading ability.
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What other problems with The Flash do fans overlook? Let us know in the comments!
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